Fuck both of you and your little high-five: my Final Girl Film Club review of Grindhouse

It was probably after Quentin Tarantino had just snorted his third line of uncut Bolivian flake off some stripper's bare foot when Robert Rodriguez finally had enough and put his digital camera down to rub his tired eyes. Rodriguez then looked over and noticed a poster for an old 50's double feature on the wall, and I'm guessing that's when he and Tarantino started talking about the cool idea of putting together a double feature of their own and calling it Grindhouse.

The idea was to create a full night of entertainment, complete with trailers and two feature films, back-to-back. It was supposed to be a big hit, and had it been a double feature of Will Ferrell ice-skating with Napoleon Dynamite in one flick and Ice Cube falling on his ass while trying to remodel a house in another, it would have been huge. Instead, Tarantino & Rodriguez chose to base their double bill on the kind of low-budget exploitation cinema that played in many seedy and rundown movie houses during the 70's & 80's, so it bombed. Shoulda thought that one through, boys.


Grindhouse is this month's Film Club pick over at Final Girl, and I wanted to join in the reindeer games, so for my "review" I watched a DVD that included the extended versions of Planet Terror and Death Proof along with the 3 trailers from the theatrical version.

The following pics were taken while I was watching the movie. I notice a lot of the other movie blogs put up nice sharp pics straight from their DVD or VHS copies, but I'm running on some antiquated equipment, so bear with me. But you can be entertained by the shaky and blurry quality of the shots, which may give you a slight idea of how increasingly hammered I got on Jack Daniels while watching this.


The first trailer is for a movie called Machete, starring my boy Danny Trejo. It feels good to watch homeboy come up, I remember the first time I saw him was in a movie with Michael Pare called The Last Hour (aka Concrete War), where he played a scary Mexican who killed people. Five years later, he was in his first Rodriguez movie, Desperado, where he played a scary Mexican who killed people. Now here he is, starring in his own fictional movie where he plays a scary Mexican who kills people, only this time he uses machetes.
Some kitty cats show up and turn into a big growling panther, then the first feature begins.
Planet Terror is Robert Rodriguez's ode to grade-Z zombie flicks and John Carpenter's badass heroes. Or as I once told a cousin of mine, Planet Terror plays like an Italian rip-off of an imaginary movie written by George A. Romero and directed by John Carpenter. Then I remembered that my cousin doesn't know who the fuck any of those dudes are in the first place. So I just told him that it's lots of gore and lots of action but zero titties. He was kinda bummed about that.

The movie begins with the character of Cherry Darling as she go-go dances on stage. Listening to the director's commentary, you find out that a lot of the character is based on the actress playing her, Rose McGowan; the whole "useless talent" thing she says throughout the movie is something Rose actually says all the time, and the running gag about Cherry wanting to become a comedian is taken from everyone in real life always complementing McGowan's wit and suggesting that she should pursue a career in stand-up. I'm assuming the same people who say that are all guys and some may have succeeded in bedding her with that bullshit, like Rodriguez ultimately did with Rose behind Mrs. Rodriguez's back. When I noticed in the end credits that McGowan also sang a couple of songs on the soundtrack, I wondered if maybe a better title for this flick would've been "I Love Rose McGowan", or "Rose & Robert: Two Against the World" or "Rosie, You So Crazy!". I'm sorry, I'm just hating because I'm lonely. Good for you, guys. I wish you both the best. Hope the wife understood.

But then again, maybe she didn't and Rodriguez feared the worst so he manifested his fear in the form of Josh Brolin's character, Dr. Block. Dr. Block is this dude who finds out that his anesthesiologist wife, Dakota, is cheating on him for the second time with Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas. I'm guessing the first time he found out he was kinda cool with it. He was probably all like "Hey, let's get down and have some Three's Company action up in this piece" but Dakota was like "Nope, I only want to be with her" and that pissed homeboy off so he broke that shit up. Well, when he discovers Dakota was wandering off for again for another taste of those lovely lady lumps, Dr. Block loses his shit completely and becomes a real fucking creep about it. I think he was even going to try to stab Dakota in the eye with a hypodermic needle. Calm the fuck down and call your lawyer, dude. I don't know, maybe Rodriguez likes to see Dakota and Fergie as him and Rose, and that asshole Dr. Block is the mother of all those kids he gave first names starting with "R".

Or maybe Robert sees himself as El Wray, this short unassuming guy who you later find out is actually the Baddest Motherfucker Who Ever Walked The Planet. Wray runs into Cherry and you find out they used to be together, so you know how that's going to go. So it's good that they found each other again, what with the world coming to an end because fucking dude from Lost had to let loose some chemical gas that turns everyone else into flesh-eating "sickos". Where Robert Rodriguez sees himself in any of this, I have no idea. I don't even know why I brought it up in the first place, but the fact that I'm currently well into my third glass of Maker's Mark may have something to do with my current train of thought.


In addition to having to deal with those zombie assholes, Wray's also got some shit going on between him and the Sheriff, played by Reese from the first Terminator movie. Sheriff Reese has both Tom Savini and the original El Mariachi as his deputies, which is pretty awesome. Savini can't shoot for shit, though.

Cherry gets attacked and winds up losing her leg, which really bums her out. On the other hand, by the end of the movie she's got a kick-ass replacement that also doubles as a machine gun and rocket launcher. Plus, I'm sure she can now qualify for handicapped parking, so there you go. Anyway, lots of blood, gore and explosions ensue.

I almost forgot. Later on, Tarantino shows up as a rapist, giving in my opinion his second best performance since From Dusk Till Dawn where he played a rapist.


The look of the movie is perfect. Not perfect as in pristine, but perfect as in getting the tone and feel of this kind of movie down. In addition to giving the appearance of a worn out film print with scratches and jump cuts, Planet Terror is also shot like something that would've played in a downtown discount house back in the late 70's/early 80's -- plenty of shaky zooms along with fast & cheap lighting set-ups. Two of my favorite examples are a kitchen scene with the Block family and Fergie's scene where she's stranded on a dark highway; they look like they could've been deleted scenes from Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead (aka The Gates of Hell).

Planet Terror even pulls the "Special Guest Star in a B-movie" trick. Bruce Willis appears as Lieutenant Muldoon, and you can tell that they shot all of his scenes in a row, mostly in close-up, and then filled the rest with stand-ins and body doubles and creative editing to give the illusion he's in the movie a lot more than he really is. It works, and it made me feel like I was watching the movie in an alternate universe where grindhouse theaters and drive-ins never died, the same alternate universe where Willis' career never quite recovered from the failure of Hudson Hawk and now he's reduced to doing special appearances in b-movies. Alternate Universe Bruce Willis probably stars in a lot of action movies and giallos over in Italy and Spain too.


It's fast and lots of fun, but ultimately this feels less like a real grindhouse movie and more like a movie for someone who always wanted to know what those kinds of movies were like but never really wanted to take the time to watch one. Because the truth is that you would need to watch about 3 or 4 real zombie/action flicks of the time to get the amount of craziness and gore and sheer scope of the stuff that happens in Planet Terror. I think Rodriguez knew that and wasn't trying to make an exact replication of that kind of movie in the first place, he just wanted to give folks the same kind of enjoyment he got growing up on that shit.


Three trailers follow. First you have Werewolf Women of the SS, by Rob Zombie. There's Nazis, young women being tortured and bloodied and branded with a swastika iron, machine gun-toting werewolves and Nicolas Cage at the end giving his usual understated performance. It's okay.

An advertisement for a fake Tex-Mex joint called Acuna Boys follows. I guess the joke here is how unappetizing the food looks, photographed in stark lighting conditions. Maybe it was because I was completely hammered at this point, but I swear I saw a shot of pizza served with potato chips. I was like Ewww, but then I remembered that I like to eat pizza with mojo potatoes at Shakey's, so really, how big a difference is THAT shit? I also dug that the Acuna Boys mascots were named after characters from one of my favorite movies, Rolling Thunder. If you haven't seen that shit, then you just don't fucking know and I can't help you. Search that shit out, bro.


Then you have Don't from Edgar Wright. This one's my favorite out of all the trailers. It's just random moments from the movie with no dialogue, only sound effects and music and GOB from Arrested Development narrating. It plays like a trailer to a foreign horror movie, except the distributors don't want to tip you off that it's either very badly dubbed or subtitled. Main dude from Hot Fuzz is supposed to be there somewhere, but I didn't catch him. The fat dude from Hot Fuzz, on the other hand, makes a big fucking impression, showing up in a diaper and with brown smudges all over his body.

The final trailer is for Eli Roth's Thanksgiving. I like this one too. It's about a dude chopping up motherfuckers over the Thanksgiving holiday. Roth also appears in this as a dude who gets his head chopped off while homegirl from Cabin Fever is giving him head, which I guess evens everything out or something. I remember Roth programmed two weeks of movies over at the New Beverly Cinema in L.A. last year, and he would introduce movies like Pieces and Mother's Day, so you can totally tell that his heart lies with this kind of stuff. He does a great job of making a trailer for a movie that would not feel out of place with those flicks. The cheerleader landing on a butcher knife was a little too much, though. I'm just a fucking prude, that's all.


A kitty cat walks through the jungle and becomes a panther, then the second feature begins. Death Proof isn't an ode or tribute to a grindhouse movie, it IS a grindhouse movie. Basically what this means is that most of those flicks are really 45-minutes of story stretched out to 90 with padding and filler. It's what the filmmakers DO with the filler and padding that makes it either worth a watch or a waste of your time, and I think Quentin Tarantino does fine with his in Death Proof.

So you have Kurt Russell as this nacho eating motherfucker named Stuntman Mike, who has this fucked-up thing for stalking girls and then crashing his reinforced muscle car into them. And that's it, really. In between the set-pieces, you get to know the two separate groups of girls he sets his sights on.


The first half of the movie involves 3 friends hanging out in Austin, Texas. You have this chick named Jungle Julia who's a local celebrity D.J., you got homegirl from Cabin Fever and Thanksgiving looking really tiny, and then you have Arlene/"Butterfly", who's visiting her friends from out of town. We watch as they hang out at a bar, drink, smoke bud, and talk. Lots of talk. Talk about guys they hooked up with, guys they're not going to hook up with and guys who they want to hook up with. To even out all this girl talk, you also have Eli Roth and a couple of other dudes (one of whom is a little too, uh...fey for me to believe him) talking about trying to hook up with these girls at the lake house tonight, and how much liquor it's going to take for them to do it.

That reminds me, have you gone drinking at a bar recently? Goddamn, it's way too fucking expensive. That's why I do all my drinking at home. It's also why I don't have friends anymore and I'm single. But maybe that's a good thing, considering how much these dudes in the movie probably end up spending on liquoring up these chicks. Damn. Whatever happened to just taking a girl out for some ice cream? Nah man, apparently now you gotta do shots of Jager and bring some fuckin' primo Kush to blaze on if you even wanna THINK about courting a young lady. Fuck that, I'll just stick to being a shut-in and jerk off. And cry.


Maybe that's why I dig all the chicks talking in this flick, and why so many regular people don't. They don't wanna hear that shit, they probably get enough of it at home. I'm trying to watch the fuckin' game, go call Laura and tell her all of that bullshit.

I read the screenplay to this shortly after having seen it for the first time, and there's a part that isn't in the final film where Jungle Julia talks about her typical day. You know what, I'm just gonna fuckin' find the script and type the shit out for you. It'll be the best written thing on my fuckin' blog, that's for sure:

JUNGLE JULIA
Hey, that's a discombobulated day in the life of a drive time DJ. I get off work at 10:00am, I'm at home by 10:30. By 11:00 I'm snuggled up on my comfy couch, in my pajamas, hittin' the bong. I watch I Love Lucy at eleven...The Andy Griffith Show...at eleven-thirty. At 12:00, I watch back to back episodes of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. At 1:00 I watch back to back episodes of Moesha. At 2:00 I watch Sponge Bob Square Pants. At 2:30 I watch Pinky and the Brain. At 3:00 I watch back to back episodes of Sister Sister. And at 4:00 I watch Tyra. Then I eat a big bowl of cereal, get unstoned and go about my day.

NATE
What do you mean you get unstoned?

JUNGLE JULIA
(like a doctor)
Dairy fucks up your high. You wanna get unhigh fast, eat a bowl of cereal.

Jesus Christ. You just fucking KNOW this is Quentin Tarantino's average day. You know this, right? But what the hey, you can't hate a dude for writing what he knows. Give homeboy some points.


You also have to give points to Tarantino for putting so much of himself into this flick, because there's a lot more personal shit in his flicks than you might think. No, I doubt that Quentin goes around running over cute girls or slicing up Japanese mafia with a sword, but there's other things spread throughout, like fetish-type shit that comes straight from his beautifully twisted mind. Anyone with eyes probably knows that Tarantino might have a bit of a thing for feet. But after having watched Death Proof the movie and having read Death Proof the script, I'm talking about other kinds of kink.

Near the end of the opening credits, there's a close-up shot of Arlene holding onto her crotch as she runs to her friend's apartment, doing the pee-pee dance. In the script, that scene goes on longer. It describes Arlene as she sits on the toilet, letting out a "racehorse stream of piss" and the shot ends with the camera zooming into Arlene's "pretty face of relief". Halfway through the movie, another woman talks about how her current man has a thing for watching her pee, and her girlfriends are more amused than grossed out. Again, maybe I'm being a prude and overreacting. But then in the script to Tarantino's next flick, "Inglourious Basterds" (that's how he spells it, people) a woman pees herself and the camera is supposed to follow down to a shot of all the urine pooling around her feet. I don't know, I'm probably just looking into it too much. But if there's ever a Grindhouse 2, and Quentin's movie is called something like "Piss, Baby, Piss!" remember where you heard about that shit first, folks.

What's also cool about Death Proof is that it sets you up for one thing and then changes it up on you. Arlene is the one who notices that evil-looking car Stuntman Mike drives, she's the only one who feels something is wrong. Everyone is talking about this lake house they're going to go later that night. They set you up for Arlene as the Final Girl and the lake house to be the setting for all the crazy bad stuff to happen and yet it doesn't work out that way.


The second half focuses on a second group of girls who are in town working on a movie. You have stuntwoman Zoe Bell, stuntwoman Samuelle L. Jackson, John McClane's Daughter (wearing a cheerleader outfit, but no butcher knife up the snatch) and Rosario Dawson. Like our previous group, they also like to talk; all the fun they're having on the movie they're working on (Tarantino himself has said this is the conversation he knows the cast & crew have about working on his movies), the guys they've hooked up with, and the guys they want to hook up with. In both groups there's a woman who wants to get romantically serious with a film director and end up living in his mansion. That was interesting.

Anyway, Stuntman Mike is on the trail, following them around and taking pictures, like he did with the last group of girls. This perv eventually works up the nerve to sneak up to Rosario's bare feet while she's asleep and starts to touch and lick them. This has absolutely NOTHING to do with Quentin's apparent foot fetish, I'm sure. Stuntman Mike's mission to get off is made easier when Zoe comes in with the idea of having her buddy Samuelle drive a muscle car at top speed while Zoe rides on the hood. Why? I guess because she just felt the need to do it. Don't question Ms. Bell. Car chases and crashes ensue.


From all the blah blah blah, you find out that Rosario Dawson is a single mother dying to take part in something with the "cool kids", Samuelle L. Jackson is packing heat and not afraid to use it, and Zoe Bell is indestructable. After what happened in the first half, you're familiar with the game Tarantino is playing and you pretty much have it all figured out -- it's not going to work out the way the movie has it set up and instead it's gonna flip your expectations upside down, right side up, backwards and forwards and all that shit.

Except that doesn't happen. The movie proceeds to go exactly the way it's been set up. Zoe Bell does survive Stuntman Mike's attack with hardly a scratch, SLJ does use her gun on that punk-ass, and Rosario's character is just as determined to join her friends as they look to kill this motherfucker.

I'm reminded of something Tarantino said about the way he originally structured his screenplay for True Romance. For the first act, the audience knows nothing while the characters know everything. For the second act, both the characters and the audience are on the same level. But for the third act, the audience knows everything while the characters know nothing, so we have no choice but to watch the characters get themselves closer and closer into danger. Then Tony Scott came and restructured the script into chronological order for the movie. But if Tarantino was to explain the structure for Death Proof, he would probably say: "First half, I know more than you. Second half, you THINK you know, but I still know more than you. I own you. I never graduated high school and this is how I display my superiority. I rule. I love feet."


While the look of this movie isn't as beaten up as Planet Terror, it still gets the feeling across. There's the occasional scratch, skipped frame and jump cut, but it's the flat lighting used in some of the settings that give it that 70's drive-in look, like an AIP production or something from Crown International. There's also an entire section that's in black & white too. The best explanation I can come up with for that is maybe Tarantino was trying to recreate the feeling of watching a grindhouse movie at his place. The print quality for the movies he'd screen for his friends varied wildly, according to Rodriguez. You'd have a movie that had gone completely pink-tinted, or one that had proper color but was really beaten up (like Planet Terror), or you had a reel or two that was only avalable in black & white, and on rare occasion you might come across a print to a 30-year old movie that looked absolutely stunning -- which would explain the final third looking so clean. That's what I came up with, anyway.


I liked Death Proof as much as I liked Planet Terror. They're completely different kinds of movies, but I think both are representative of the kind of flicks that only Dark Sky or Synapse or Anchor Bay or one of those other companies release on DVD, and I think both are a good time, drunk or sober. Preferably drunk. It's too bad Grindhouse failed at the box office. I would've liked to have seen a follow-up. But I'm obviously in the minority. The majority is busy getting ready to pay their hard-earned money to see The Pink Panther 2 next month.

Ok, time to close this sucker up and end it with a little moment some viewers may have missed. In the theatrical version of Death Proof, just as Arlene is about to take Stuntman Mike inside and give him a lapdance, a "Reel Missing" card fills the screen. Since the previous five minutes or so were all about working the audience up to see this lapdance, we're left with cinematic blue balls, left laughing and applauding at being suckered like that. It wasn't until I saw this at a drive-in, that I was able to hear something being said right before the "Reel Missing" card goes away and the rest of the movie continues. See if you can figure out what the suspiciously Quentin-Tarantino-in-High-Pitched-Black-Voice-sounding guy is saying. Enjoy.

Unlucky blog #13

Read the Gran Torino entry below this one, if you haven't already.

Oh, he also sings the theme song at the end. In character. That was, uh, interesting.

You know that old cranky guy in your neighborhood, the one who has a flagpole with both the American flag and a flag representing the branch of the Armed Forces he served with? You know, the same scary old dude who sits outside on the porch all day, reading the paper, drinking either coffee or beer behind his incredibly well-maintained front yard?

Well, Gran Torino is HIS movie.

Like young Wall Street types probably jerk off to the movie Wall Street or salesmen probably genuflect in front of a framed photo of Alec Baldwin's character in Glengarry Glen Ross every morning before work, or servers in restaurants probably cheer and clap as they watch Ryan Reynolds-Johansson in Waiting spit in some overdemanding cunt's food, or Honda rice-burning street racers probably showed up in droves at theaters to watch the first Fast and the Furious or geeks probably nod in agreement with the shit the characters in Free Enterprise say or stoners undeniably dig on the Cheech & Chong and Harold & Kumar flicks, Old Cranky Porch-Sitters are probably going to see a lot of themselves in Clint's character, or at least what they ideally see themselves as, and they're gonna love watching one of their own smack some of these darn young'uns around and show them a thing or two about a thing or two.

If your local Old Cranky Porch-Sitter didn't care for Clint Eastwood before, well then after this flick, good ol' Clint is gonna be that old cranky dude's bro. Except he would never use the word Bro, because that kind of slang is only used by spooks.

Yup, I said "spooks". Just one of the many racial epithets used by Clint in Gran Torino. There's a lot more, too. Pretty much all races and ethnicities get theirs, except for our good friends, the Arabs. And while Clint throws out "spade" and "spook" at the brothas, he knows better than to use "the N-word". But everyone else? Fair fuckin' game, baby. Oh, wait -- I don't remember him calling anyone fag or queer, but that's okay, I say that enough on my own.

You know how fucking awesome Clint Eastwood is? Shiiiit, I don't have to tell you, you already fuckin' know. But I'm gonna say it anyway. He's so awesome that at 78-fucking-years-old I never doubt him as someone I didn't want to fuck with. People make jokes about Sly Stallone still trading punches or bombs as Rocky or Rambo, and by the time Arnold became governor, people said he might as well have run for office because nobody was going to buy him as the Terminator anymore. But NOBODY will talk shit about Clint. Not just because of the motherfucking respect homeboy deserves, but because I think most of us really believe that if we do, a short while later Clint will fucking knock on our door and when you or I answer it, he will have with him a .357 caliber retort to our shit-talking. Which we'd deserve.

So yeah, in this flick Clint's wife just died and because he's a fuckin' Man, you ain't getting any tears from his eyes because of it. The only emotion you get from him during the funeral is a couple long growls he gives out when he sees that his chubby sons didn't even have the fucking decency to tell the grandkids to dress at least somewhat properly for the occasion. After the funeral, another chubby dude, a young one, shows up and it turns out he's a priest who became close with Mrs. Clint a few months before her death. She asked Father Youngdude to keep an eye on the old man, you know, make sure he doesn't keel over from being such a hardass and maybe, just maybe, get a little bit into the Jesus thing. Clint doesn't make it easy on Father Youngdude, though, so there's some pretty funny shit between them in the movie.

Clint's annoyed at everything but one of his annoyances is how his neighborhood has changed, what with all the other White people gone and "these chinks" taking their place. So the rest of the movie involves the relationship between him and his Hmong neighbors, in particular a brother and sister duo. The sister is kinda cute, but the brother is so quiet for the first 20 minutes, I thought he was retarded or traumatized or both. Turns out he's just shy, which is an easy mistake to make. Anyway, Clint doesn't so much soften up during the flick as he just gradually becomes more cool with them. There's also the occasional run-in with Hmong gang members, Latinos who haven't yet upgraded to semi-automatic pistols and black homeboys who love chicks who say No.

I don't think this is really that great of a script. The way I figured this is, if you cast like some other old actor, this shit would most likely play on the Hallmark channel or Lifetime, not on the silver screen. Some of the dialogue sounds a little hokey. I swear, at least twice Clint actually says "why these kids today...". It doesn't help either that pretty much any other actor in the movie who isn't named Clint Eastwood kinda lags it in the acting department. I'm guessing he picked non-actors for the Hmongs, but even some of the actual actors seem like they could use another take or two. I understand Clint's style is to shoot fast and only allow two takes maximum, and that didn't seem to hurt people like Sean Penn or Hilary Swank or Morgan Freeman or Angelina Jolie. They all gave great performances in his movies and won awards for them (well, Jolie hasn't but the Oscar noms aren't out yet, and I'm betting she will), but maybe with this one he could've taken a little more time with these dudes. I know, who the fuck am I to give Clint any advice? I think it just shows how good the actors in Clint's movies are to begin with for them to pull off the quality shit they pulled in under two takes, whereas motherfuckers whose previous experience was a local middle school production of Our Town might need a little more hand holding. The only other pretty good performance in this flick would have to be the barber, played by Potential Zodiac Killer, otherwise it's a little ehhh with the rest of them.

It's also melodramatic as fuck which I'm usually fine with and even love sometimes, except here I get the sense maybe it wasn't supposed to be. The whole movie balances between dead fucking serious and really fucking ridiculous. I ended up laughing quite a bit during this movie but half the time I wasn't sure if that shit was supposed to be funny. There's a scene in particular where Clint takes Shy Hmong to the barber shop and halfway through the scene, the barber does something that made me and the audience laugh, but then right afterwards I questioned not only the logic of his actions, but the sanity of the screenwriter. It's a simple 3-letter question: WTF?

I'm not giving Clint any shit though, because in addition to being an awesome screen presence, he's also a damn good filmmaker and elevates this shit the best he can. Seriously, I think if the man was known only for the movies he directed, he would still deserve major props. Some of my faves from the past twenty years: White Hunter Black Heart, Unforgiven, A Perfect World, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Letters from Iwo Jima, and I really liked that Changeling flick a lot too. He seems to have developed a style in the past ten years or so that I fucking love, I guess I'd call it "Old Man Emo"; lots of darkness, with only the occasional shaft of light filling the frame, and slow melodic tunes in the background that were composed by the man himself. If I can sound more like a douche, I'll say that it's almost like a reflection of the dude's soul -- a dude who knows all too well that he's a lot closer to the end than he is to the beginning, you get me? He really gets that tone and mood through to the screen.

There's a sequence in Flags of our Fathers -- which I liked but didn't love -- that takes place on one of the ships headed for Iwo Jima. There's Marines all around, some playing cards, some standing around and bullshitting, some in their bunks. Then a song comes on the radio, called "I'll Walk Alone" that plays through most of the ship. The movie cuts to all of these Marines, either in groups or by themselves, as all the fucking wind just goes out of their sails and they become quiet when they hear it. They're just standing there, listening to this fucked up song about a chick who will wait for as long as it'll take for her man to come back from the war. It's like they were almost just about to kinda put the war and their current situation out of their minds for a short while, and then that fucking song comes on and now that shit is front and center again. The scene ends with some dude sadly strumming along on his guitar and another dude next to him staring at his Zippo lighter, closing it shut when the song ends. I forgot my point other than I thought that was a fucking great scene. But if there's a Movie Heaven, then I'd like to think that Sergio Leone and Don Siegel are up there, smoking fat cigars and talking about what a great fucking filmmaker their boy Eastwood has become.

Allow me to get completely off-topic and let you know that I am completely fucking wired right now. I got a coffee maker for Christmas and it's been a long time since I used one and I put way too many spoons of the coffee in the motherfucker and I'm feeling the fucking effects. It's really fucking bad. I can hardly type now. I actually had to take a break after the last sentence to rapidly punch the air while doing a medium-volume Bruce Lee kind of screech for half-a-minute. I WISH I was joking about that. Fuck I'm gonna do it again. I just rapidly Kung-Fu-punched the air and did the noise again. I am SOOOO not kidding. Fuck. I feel like I should be sitting cross-legged on a bed across from Julianne Moore and Heather Graham, with the state of mind I'm in. No fucking joke, I would not look out-of-place AT ALL if I was in that scene right now. So let me just say if there isn't another blog after say, a couple of weeks, then I probably dropped dead of apoplexy.

Toomanythingstoomanythingstoomanythings. Too many things.

Ok. I'm back from a forced break, and now I actually feel tired. I'm gonna water down the coffee a tad and have another cup.

In spite of all the flaws, Gran Torino is still an entertaining flick you should check out. Wait. Let me take the opportunity to rephrase that and fuckin' Gene Shalit that shit: "Even though it's been built with some faulty parts and has occasional engine trouble, this Gran Torino is a ride worth taking!".

Seriously, for all the shit I just gave the movie, I feel I got my money's worth anyway because it's an old-school Clint Eastwood movie that features homeboy talking shit to everyone and taking shit from no one -- and it feels good to get another Clint movie like that. Whether it was supposed to be this funny or not ultimately doesn't matter, because I still enjoyed it. My sister-in-law's friend saw it and cried at the end. I went over to a couple message boards and some of those dudes say they think it's one of the best movies they've seen in the past year. Another review online says it's so bad, it's good. I listened to a couple people at the Onion A.V. Club this morning and their opinion is a bit closer to mine. No review I've checked out considers Gran Torino boring. Good times is good times, I say.

I saw this at a matinee show. It was a pretty packed crowd comprising of all ages, mostly men of course. But I'd say half of the audience was people of a certain age, meaning you had a nice share of people walking on crutches, along with people who take 5 minutes to walk up or down an aisle. It was the best crowd to watch this movie with, in the same way that when I saw Menace II Society in Inglewood, I was watching it with the best crowd.

There will be people, regardless of age, who will dig the fact that Clint never stops with the racist language. Some will dig that Clint was being true to the character, because people don't magically change overnight. Some will dig the fact that these words are not just being said, but by the hero, no less. And some will just dig hearing those words. That's their problem. I'm reminded of that show All in the Family. The idea was supposed to be that the bigoted shit Archie Bunker said was funny because he was so ignorant. But you just fucking know there were people out there who were probably all "Atta boy! You tell 'em, Arch!" and that's sad, but again, that's their fuckin' problem. You know what MY fuckin' problem is? My inability to make a point. Wait, I think what I'm trying to say is that much like All in the Family, I'm sure there will be people who will enjoy Gran Torino for the wrong reasons and you'll probably hear from people who think this movie is the Devil because of those assholes. But you shouldn't fault the product, fault the consumer. Or something like that, I don't know, I'm stupid.

Halfway through the movie, a red-haired dude in the audience stood up and walked over to a dude who was wearing a cap. He then loudly asked Cap Dude to take his cell phone conversation outside. I didn't even know, because I was into the movie and I was too far to have noticed anyway, but apparantly Cap Dude had been talking to someone on the phone for god knows how long. Cap Dude looks up at Red Hair and yells "NO!" and goes back on the phone. Red Dude says "I'm not going to ask you again, get up and take your conversation outside". Cap Dude gets up, still on the phone and says "Make me!" and Red Dude says "Leave!" and Cap Dude starts to walk away, looking at Red Dude the entire time. Cap Dude is wearing a leather coat and has a mustache. He looks like he could be raza, which makes me a little ashamed and angry at him. As Cap Dude leaves the auditorium, he loudly complains to whoever is on the other line that someone is giving him shit for talking on the phone. Just as he nears the exit hall, he looks back toward the Red Dude and yells "COME ON!", then leaves the room while complaining on the cell phone. I loved how upset Cap Dude got about the whole thing, like he was the wronged party, not Red Dude and everyone else in the audience who paid to watch a movie and not to listen to some cell phone conversation. Why the nerve of that gentleman for demanding that I leave for speaking loudly on a cell phone in a movie theater while a movie was playing! I'll say! The only thing that would've made this funnier/scarier was if homeboy with .380 in his sweatpants was in the audience. It took me about five minutes afterwards to calm down and get back into the movie.

In a previous blog I talked about how all the real Cinematic Tough Guys, the ones we actually believed in, are all gone. But I forgot about Clint. How the fuck could I forget about Clint? That's my bad, I'm sorry. I was probably inebriated when I wrote that shit, that would be my excuse. But I realize that Clint is the last one, man. After he dies, that's it. No more genuine Badass Motherfuckers in movies. Goddamn. I wasn't born yet when John Wayne died, but I fear when the day comes and it's Clint's time to go, I will know that fucked up feeling I'm sure lots of people got when the Duke went. You gotta appreciate the time you have left with these badasses, and since word on the street is that this is Clint's last acting performance, you should check this shit out when you can. Just leave the cell phone and .380 in the car, please?

You can take your Arnold Palmer drink and shove it up your fucking ass

Yesterday I was in ugly fucking Hollywood at the American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre in the City of -- ah, Jesus Christ, just give me one or two names to call your theatre, people. Not this long-ass Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim bullshit. Same shit with the American Cinematheque at the Aero Theatre or the Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre. Goddammit, you guys make it worse for me and my imaginary readers when I have to type all this shit out.

So yeah, I was in Hollywood to catch the 70's flick Earthquake. Truth is, I was never that big a fan of this movie, or disaster movies in general, but I was like 12 the last time I saw it and for this screening they were going to play it in "Sensurround", so I went. This Sensurround shit was supposed to be a big deal back in the day, when some of Universal Pictures' big blockbusters would use it. I don't know the exact details, you can go to Wikipedia for that shit, but based on my experience last night Sensurround is watching a movie with all the sound coming from the front, like some mono shit. Then when something crazy happens, like an earthquake, the whole fucking theater vibrates like a mo-fo. Not only can you feel it, you can hear that shit in the air. It's like sitting on the biggest fucking subwoofer turned all the way up. If you're constipated, five minutes of Sensurround should clear that shit right out.

It's actually pretty fucking sweet. I was completely sober and self-conscious, but goddamn if I wasn't giddy like a little kid during that shaky shit. It was fun, what can I tell ya. The whole fuckin' theater shaking and vibrating while watching badly dressed 70's motherfuckers getting crushed by falling debris on the big screen is fucking Good Times. If you ever hear about a screening of Earthquake playing near you in Sensurround, do that shit, bro. Next time though, I'm taking some JD with me.

Let me Tarantino this fuckin' blog and jump back about a couple hours earlier. I arrived at ugly fucking horrible piece-of-shit Hollywood two hours early for two reasons; first, to find a good free parking spot on a side street, and second, to get something to eat at a place called Skooby's. I've seen the name Skooby's thrown around by hipper-than-thou nightclubbing L.A. assholes over at Yelp when they put down Pink's in favor of this place. Whenever I have to be in this giant turd known as Los Angeles, I try to kill a lot of fucking birds with one stone. Usually this means if I have to come here to watch a movie that will only play in the city, might as well enjoy some of the local grub that's supposed to be good.

I find a spot and walk two blocks down to this Skooby's. I get a chili-chedder dog and a large garlic-lover's fries because I'm disgusting and fat and stinky and shit. I also get an Orange Crush and an extra thing of aioli sauce. I make it to go, because what little seating they have is all taken. That's usually fine with me, I'm cool with eating in my disgusting car, but I'm worried about eating all that garlic in my vehicle. But whatever, I'll do it. I walk the two blocks back and I'm like three car lengths away from my ride when I realize that I forgot my soda. Fuck. So I walk the two blocks back and they give me my drink. I walk the two blocks back to my car and open the door and sit down -- and that's when I realize that for the first time in years I didn't check my food before leaving the establishment. I didn't check my order. I didn't check my order. I didn't check my order. I, the fucking cocksucking idiot, did not check my goddamn motherfucking order.

I open up the foil and find that they gave me a plain hot dog.

All I can do is sigh. Serves the douche right. I consider just eating the plain hot dog, but then I remember that I paid TWO DOLLARS EXTRA for chili and cheddar, so goddamn it I'm getting my fucking proper food. I get out of the car and run the two blocks back to Skooby's and when I get there, I'm completely out of breath because I'm fat and out of shape. I tell the guy what's up and he tells the grill lady to put that shit on, so she ladles chili onto the dog and sprinkles some cheese and hands it back to me. Then I walk the two blocks back to my car. So I guess it's no surprise when I tell you the food is fine, but not that fucking great, especially considering how much it costs. A chili-cheddar dog, large garlic fries and a bottle of Orange Crush came out to 12.99. Then another .25 plus tax for extra aioli. I did not know it was possible to get raped with your pants still on. But I guess I was asking for it. People seem to prefer this to Pink's because there's no line, but whatever man. I'd only go back for the garlic fries.

I get to the Egyptian, reeking of garlic, and buy my ticket. There's people already inside eating hors d'oeuvres, but the guy up front tells me they're with the Producer's Guild, so us regular folks can wait the next 45 minutes outside. I'm not hating on them, so I go to the front of the line and play Ikari Warriors on my PSP.
This older man starts chatting up a couple behind me, asking if they've ever seen this in Sensurround. They say no, and he says "I have". He talks about how he saw this at Grauman's Chinese when it opened and the couple seems a little freaked out by the Sensurround process, wondering if shit's gonna fall from the ceiling or the world's gonna end or something. You see, the poster for the movie outside also had a little warning posted about how Sensurround might fuck up your shit and that the management isn't responsible for how your bitch ass might react to it. The dude tells the couple not to worry.

Inside, there's a few introductions before the movie begins. One by a Cinematheque staff member, another by this dude who is producing a week of disaster movie screenings at the Egyptian, and then another by Laurent Bouzereau. If you don't know who he is, then you just don't fucking know. But I'll just say he's the best in the business for "making-of" documentaries and interviews for DVD's and laserdiscs. He's written some cool movie books as well.

Le Bouz then goes on to introduce one of the stars of Earthquake, Genevieve Bujold. Ms. Bujold doesn't so much introduce the movie as she gives more of a Lifetime Acheivement Award speech. She talks about how she moved from Quebec to L.A. to shoot Earthquake, was only supposed to stay 3 months but has now been living here for 35 years. That's it for Earthquake related stuff. From there on, she talks about getting married, having a kid, staying busy, and at the end she thanks the audience from the bottom of her heart. Then she says "God Bless Barack Obama!" and most of the audience goes fucking nuts. That was pretty ballsy of her, so she gets my props for that. I'm sure there were some hardcore Charlton Heston fans in the audience who were like "shut up and sing" or whatever those fucking assholes always say when it's not someone on their side. This Bujold lady seems like a real spitfire, a genuine Broad, and I can totally see her busting her directors' and co-stars' balls back in the day for underestimating this tiny woman. She was supposed to play Capt. Janeway in Star Trek Voyager, but left after a few days, so you probably know how THAT fucking went. Anyway, she's really cute in Earthquake.

Yeah, Earthquake. They actually played that Sensurround warning before the movie, which made everyone laugh and clap afterwards. Then, the movie. It starts with a shot of downtown L.A. and everyone just fucking laughs. I think it's because this made in the early 70's and L.A. back then just looked so fuckin...spare. There's buildings and high-rises but not as many as now. Later in the movie, there's a helicopter shot of Sunset Blvd., and you see the Cinerama Dome and I'm like "Holy shit, there's so much fucking ROOM all around the joint!". It's beautiful and kind of sad, really. I wonder if I'd hate the city so much if it was more like the way it was back then. Probably. But I'd love to imagine it anyway.

Chuck Heston is this former NFL player now turned architect, and you find out that his wife is also his boss's daughter. That's right, Friendo -- he married into it. But because Chuckie Baby's the fucking man, he's also got a little something on the side, played by our gal Genevieve. He fucked up though, because not only is she an aspiring actress, she's also a single mom. If only Tom Leykis had been on the airwaves back then to give homeboy advice, but Leykis was probably too busy beating his second wife at the time. Allegedly.

Anyway, Chuckie's wife is on to him, but you're not on her side because she's a boozing drama queen. Come to think of it, I'm a boozing drama queen too. But yeah, Booze Queen looks like the type of Older Rich Lady who would stand outside at 9 am in her robe with a glass of vodka rocks in her hand watching Javier the pool boy clean up and then afterwards she would ask poor Javier if he would like to come inside for some "lemonade" and Javier would just respond "Que?" and she would let out that deep laugh of hers that only years of smoking Silva Thins would give you, then she would lead him inside to begin work on earning his citizenship the hard way.

George Kennedy is a cop who the audience is supposed to cheer for when he beats up criminals after a long car chase, but yet when cops do this in real life, it's fuckin' Riot Time in the ol' town tonight. So now, he's under suspension and drinking it up in a bar with motherfuckin' Walter Matthau. Matthau's the silent comic relief, so in between shots of people screaming as the cold arms of Bloody Horrific Death envelop them in its icy embrace, you have shots of a completely shitfaced Walter M. dressed like fuckin' Huggy Bear, trying to down another shot of booze. Komedy!

There's this skinny white dude who looks like what John Holmes probably looked like on his deathbed who works at a grocery store and you know there's something up because his apartment is nothing but weights and karate weapons and pictures of male bodybuilders. The one picture he has of a half-naked woman is hidden in his closet. Hmm. He gets picked on by Disco Stu and two other guys who would only exist in the 70's, and they call him "fag", so they're all right with me. Later you find out Dead John Holmes is in the National Guard and after the earthquake he puts on a uniform (and a short wig to hide up his hippie hair), straps on his M-16, joins his brother soldiers and busts some caps into Disco Stu and the boys when he runs into them later on.

Dead John Holmes has a thing for this smoking hot chick with awesome 70's fro-hair. Fro-Chick is broke and in need of money and goes to the movies alone, which means she and I are made for each other. Of course, a hot chick who goes to the movies by herself automatically turns Earthquake into science fiction, but just let me have my illusion. Fro-Chick is also the sister of a dude who's partners with the Black Evel Knievel. She also likes free donuts.

We sit through all of these assholes' soap opera bullshit for about an hour and then it's fuckin' time for the Big Shakedown. The earthquake sequence goes on for about eight minutes, but I'm sure it's not really supposed to be that long, and the film is just showing us what happens at the same time to the different characters during the quake. Kinda like in The Fast and the Furious, when you're watching that street race and you're thinking "Dude, they've been driving at top speed for two minutes. They'd be in fuckin' El Monte by now, not just down one block!", but you know that's not what's really happening.

I'm not kidding when I say that the Sensurround could've gone eighty minutes and I would've loved it. During those quake sequences, I almost came close to understanding those assholes who drive their shitty cars with the crap music all the way loud and bumping that fuckin' bass for everyone in a five-block radius to feel. Almost.

You can probably see a person's true colors in times of danger, and based on that, the character of Booze Queen's father is a Solid Dude. He's on the top floor of a high-rise office building during the quake, and while everyone else is running for their lives and screaming and falling and doing everything else EXCEPT ducking under a desk or doorway, Dad is reaching out through a broken window trying to pull the poor window washers inside. He fails, but c'mon, who do you know who would put themselves out for their fellow man during some crazy shit like that? Then after the quake, while everyone is freaking out, homeboy takes charge and starts delegating and shit. He gets everyone off their ass and working on getting the fuck out of there and to a safer place. Of course, a couple women (probably Black Friday shopper-types) run without paying attention and end up falling to their deaths. And it was here that suddenly "9/11" flashed in my mind and my movie buzz was completely killed. Dead. Goddammit.

I wish I was joking but that shit did remind me of that day. It sucks when Hollywood escapist shit can't accomplish it's goals because some overly sensitive asshole like me thinks of THAT shit. Sucks for me, anyway. If I'm watching a movie with a friend and something like that happens, I usually make the asshole move of looking at my bro and shaking my head and putting my hand over my eyes like I want to cry. Because it's funny to do that, but also I think, as a self-defense mechanism. But I was watching this shit alone, and I wasn't going to risk pulling that on the stranger next to me. I mean, what if he takes me seriously and puts his hand on my shoulder and tells me it's okay to cry? I guess I can tell him to "take your hands off me, homo", but then that would be TOO funny. I guess what I'm trying to say is fuck Osama bin Laden.

Anyway, this dude falls off a building but manages to hang on to a railing. Everyone else is freaked out and watches this poor guy hanging on for dear life, but then here comes Dad, pushing everyone aside so he can try to help the dude. This guy rocks! Remember, Dad is the chairman of the board, the main dude at Chuckie's workplace, a man with power, money and respect. Usually this kind of character would be played off as some rich uptight scumbag who's only looking out for himself, but not Dad! Besides, they already have that character in this movie. His name is Mr. Cameron and he's the kind of asshole who won't put in the money to retrofit his buildings so they can be earthquake proof. This asshole probably works from his home anyway, so of course he wouldn't give a fuck. And in case you didn't get what a fucking prick Mr. Cameron is, during the quake he pushes aside a lady so he can get the last spot in a crowded elevator that was rightfully hers. Well, he did that broad a favor because the elevator ends up plummeting down and I guess no one tried jumping up at the last second because they all go splat and goofy cartoon blood fills the screen. It's really funny shit, as long as you don't think about all the sad mothers and fathers and daughters and sons who will eventually be notified that their beloveds currently resemble a pile of mashed-up cherry pie mixed with bad 70's fashions at the bottom of an elevator shaft. It's unfortunate collateral damage from the hard takedown of Mr. Cameron.

Well anyway, Dad once again fails to save a dude from falling. Just like George Kennedy fails to save his job, or how Black Evel Knievel fails at his latest stunt, or how our gal Genevieve fails at keeping Chuckie Baby, or how that old Doctor fails to keep the injured alive or how ultimately Charlton Heston and his wife just straight out Fail. It's pretty fuckin' downbeat for a "fun" movie, but then I've never been a fan of disaster movies to begin with. Aside from the awesome Sensurround, there's really nothing else in this flick to stand out from the rest of the genre. If you like this sort of shit then I can see this being worth a watch with some friends and some booze. Make sure there's some chicks in your group too, so they can laugh at the goofy looking '70's clothes the women wear in the movie. I understand chicks like to point that shit out, or so I've heard from people who actually talk to chicks. I'm losing steam with this blog entry, maybe my heart was never in this one, but I had to justify that 12.99 at Skooby's somehow. Maybe I'll come back and re-write it, maybe I won't.

I probably won't. I'm sorry.

But I'll finish it with this true story. The first time I saw this, I was about 5 or 6 years old, and I was watching Earthquake with my mom, my sister and my aunt. There's a part in the movie where some goofy truck driver hauling cattle loses control of his truck on the overpass when the quake hits. They cut between the unfortunate cows and the truck swaying back and forth on the freeway. Finally the poor dude loses control and the truck goes flipping over the overpass with all the cows still mooing. Crash and smash. Everyone else in the room laughed because the cows were not only still mooing by the time the truck was upside down in the air, but they remained standing on the back of the truck. I guess it's a force of gravity thing. Well, I got mad at them for finding it funny. Not only was I saddened by all that bovine death, but I then completely lost it and started to cry. For real. So whenever some dude tries to insult me and calls me a sissy, I guess they're kinda right.

For the record, I like to pronounce "Arab" in either a redneck accent or a thick foreign accent of indeterminate origin, but that's just me

You know what fucking pisses me off -- aside from everything else? This term "people watching". I notice this whenever I read reviews of restaurants at places at Yelp or some other fucking site. You see it all the time, "it's also great for people watching" or "the tables outside make it a great spot for people watching". What the fuck ever happened to minding your own goddamn business? Why can't you just concentrate on the food you're eating, the beverage you're drinking or maybe, just maybe, the person you're hanging out with?

There's a scene in the Emilio Estevez cinematic classic Freejack, where Emilio's character is eating at some really skanky greasy spoon. For some douchebag reason, Emilio feels the need to stare at some poor ugly old schmuck trying to eat his plate of slop. Eventually, the old schmuck looks up at Emilio and pulls out an old-school single action revolver and tells Sr. Estevez something like "If you keep staring at me, you'll see me kill you" and I was like Right on, Old Dude! But then punk ass Emilio pulls out a fucking Glock, places it on the table and not only continues to stare at the old dude but then starts to smile at him! Daddy-O's outgunned, so he has no choice but to go back to polishing off his dish of gruel, while bitch-ass Emilio keeps maddogging him. There was a point I was trying to make here, but I forgot, so I'll just say that I'm not kidding about Freejack being an awesome flick, 'cause it is. The fucking movie ends with a song by Scorpions during the end credits, need I say more? No I don't, so there.

Look, I understand taking notice of motherfuckers who make spectacles of themselves in one way or another, otherwise I wouldn't be able to write half the shit I'm writing. But when you go out of the way to look at your fellow man in some kinda sick "amuse me, slave" mentality, then you're just being a fucking asshole. Don't fucking look at me unless you want to fucking talk to me, is all I'm saying. Unless you're a chick, then that'll just make me think you wanna fuck me or something and that's cool.

Anyway, after seeing Valkyrie I was on my way home and I noticed a video store with a banner reading "GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE". Now for most people, that means a chance for buying cheap DVD's, but if you're like me (and I really hope for your sake that you aren't) you see this as an opportunity to look for old VHS movies. Movies that will most likely disappear after VHS and will never see a higher format release ever again. Most normal people will not shed a tear, because who wants to waste their time on shit like that? I, on the other hand, have and will shed tears for these movies when they are never seen again. So it is my mission, along with my fellow nerds, to buy as many of these movies whenever and wherever we find them. So I took a left turn and drove up to the place.

I mentioned Valkyrie in the last paragraph and that reminds me of something else. I remember about 12 or so years ago there was a review in Entertainment Weekly of Bryan Singer's first movie Public Access (here's my review: It Sucks), which had finally come out on video. There was one part that I remember pretty well, where the reviewer compared Singer with Quentin Tarantino. Both were film brats of the same generation and both were darlings of the film world at the time because of their first couple of films, but they each had differing types of film education and tastes. Bryan Singer went to USC film school and studied the classics of film and the masters of filmmaking, or as the reviewer said "Singer boned up on the good stuff", developing a keen and discriminating taste in cinema. Quentin Tarantino, on the other hand, inhaled every kind of movie in that video store he worked at, from the greatest work of film art to the trashiest piece-of-shit ever released, and to QT it was all the same. Good times equals good times to homeboy, whether it was directed by John Ford or Cirio H. Santiago.

I don't know where the fuck I'm going with this, but I guess the best way I could put this is that when it comes to movie watching, sometimes I feel like Quentin Tarantino in a Bryan Singer world. Sometimes I'll show one of these flicks to a buddy or relative and when it works, it really works. But other times I'd get the sense that he or she would rather be watching something else -- ANYTHING ELSE. So I guess the cool thing about this blog is that I can at least talk about some of this shit without wasting too much of your time. It's one thing for me to force you to sit through Master of the Flying Guillotine for ninety minutes and another for you to choose to spend five minutes reading my exaggerated recollection of it, I think. I hope. So that's where I'll be coming from when I start talking about some of these flicks. You're welcome.

Back to the video store. Lucky for me, they had quite a large collection of old VHS movies, most looking like they're just what the doctor ordered. I could watch a couple of these at night, washed down with some booze and for the next three hours or so I can forget that I live in a world of shit. Which I guess is the whole point of movies, no? Escapism? Over twenty years ago, most of these movies were sold for anywhere from $29.95 to $99.95 and today I was able to get them for .25 cents each. This is cool because it slightly muffles that part of my brain that keeps nagging me "Don't you have better things to spend your money on, you broke bastard! PRIORITIZE!". It's all going to shit no matter what, so fuck it, I say. I'll write "reviews" for them sometime soon.

One more thing. This a kind of addendum to my earlier review of the roadshow version of Che, a few blogs back. During the battle scenes in the first half of that flick, I felt something familiar about the whole deal, like I'd seen it before. Then I remembered: Guerrilla War for the good ol' 8-bit NES:




Turns out that this thinly-veiled recreation of the Cuban Revolution wasn't so thinly-veiled over in Japan, where this game was called "Guevara" and gamers actually played as Che Guevara (player 1) and Fidel Castro (player 2)! I'm no socialist or commie, but goddamn it if I don't wanna play this game right now. In fact, I will:

Viva la PSP homebrew revolucion!

"Come to me, Son of Alois, kneel before Zod!"

I don't know if this was like a passive-aggressive being an asshole kinda thing, or if I was just was short-tempered or both, but when I went to the ticket booth and asked the dude for a ticket to Valkyrie, he tells me in this faggy voice to speak up, so I yell at this motherfucker ONE FOR VALKYRIE PLEASE!!! I said it nicely the first time, but this dude had to mock my tender voice, I guess. I'm sure it's my fault, though. It's always my fault.

Just as the MGM lion starts to roar from the screen, a dude who's fatter than me and is sitting a couple rows ahead of me starts chatting furiously with his partner. He then gets up and waddles over to the aisle and notices the German text popping up and loudly exclaims "Oh man! It's already starting, oh man! I'm missing it already!" and quickly waddles out of the room. Some dude in a baseball cap walks up next to me (I'm in an aisle seat) and just stands there, scoping out the theatre for the first five minutes. Fatter-than-me dude comes back with a large popcorn and drink and waddles back to his seat. I'm glad that all he missed was some kind of Hitler oath being read in German and translated in English, instead of some story-related shit. Finally, a chick comes in the room and walks up to Baseball Cap Dude and he tells her the only seats available are near the front. She looks behind me and says "There's two empty seats right there" and he just shrugs, then they walk all the way to the front and sit there.

Valkyrie is about a group of Englishmen who are lead by an American in a plan to kill Hitler by posing as Nazis and then getting close enough to that fucking asshole so they could blow him up into little bitch-ass Fuhrer bits. I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll just say that Hitler committed suicide nine months later. Take that as you wish. By the way, why is it that every asshole who shows up and kills a bunch of people then takes his own life? These fucking scumbags always have to take the pleasure from us, don't they?

When the movie begins, they are well into the first part of the plan, because most of these dudes are in pretty high ranking positions within the German army. But these guys are really fucking sure of themselves, because they don't even try to act like Germans, if they're English then they're REALLY fucking English. One wonders if they always did it that way, or if they just started slipping. At least the American tries to speak German in the first five minutes, and then he just says Fuck It and starts speaking English. It's all good though, because the real Nazis are either really fucking slow or just concentrating on who's a Jew and who isn't a Jew to notice any of this at all. The movie never acknowledges that these guys are really English or American either, I guess the filmmakers just wanted us to figure that one out for ourselves. The only member of The Valkyrie Squad who seems to be really German is an interesting-looking typist chick who looks like Sarah Silverman fused with Princess Leia.

The American goes by the name "Stauffenberg" and he and his limey bros have meetings in nice houses filled with old white men and General Zod from Superman to discuss how they're going to kill this motherfucker. The old Brits give respect to homeboy because not only does he show up wearing an eye patch, but he also goes without a hand or most fingers. He at the very least, LOOKS committed. They get into the specifics of the plan, but I couldn't hear any of it because at that moment there was a loud RINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRINGRING from about two seats away from me. I looked over and saw this older gent taking out his huge Zack Morris cellular phone, trying to shut it off. Instead I hear some ladies voice on speaker or something so he starts pushing a bunch of buttons, and at that point all I could hear was BEEP BOOP BAWP BOOP BOOP BEEP and then the phone started rapidly ringing again. So then he BEEP BOOP BAWP BOOP BOOP BEEP's it again, but it's not working. Finally after a minute of this, the dude figures out maybe it's wise to take this Luddite shit he's going through OUTSIDE the movie auditorium. Maybe? By the time he left, Stauffenberg and his bros were done talking and all I got was that they were going to blow up Adolf the Cunt with a briefcase filled with explosives.

The plan's specifics also involve getting the Reserve Army to come in and help with the takeover, after sending Hitler to Hell where he fucking belongs, even though the Reserves will have no idea they're part of a coup. They'll just think they're doing their job. Here's where shit got a little unnerving to me. The major of the Reserve Army is played by this dude who played a Nazi in The Pianist and the problem was that I found this guy to be very charismatic, at least I did. They also put him in these situations that the audience might find a little sympathetic, like whenever heavy shit goes down, he happens to be in the middle of some shit, like doing his swim laps or getting his hair cut. Ain't that a bitch?

I'm sure most of us have had similar shit happen to us (except I'm sure most of you aren't fuckin' Nazis) like maybe you might be in the middle of a shower when the phone rings and you just fucking know it's some important shit you were waiting for, like a job maybe, or you're about to enjoy a bowl of Cap'n Crunch and your fucking neighbor knocks on the door to ask if you can help get her cat out of the air vent it somehow got itself into. Fuck. That cereal's gonna be fucking soggy as fuck when you get back, all because Mittens decided to play John McClane in the first Die Hard. Motherfucker.

Anyway, the way this dude plays this German you're like "you know, this major isn't such a bad dude, he's kinda cool, even" but then you remember that he's A FUCKIN NAZI and that leaves you feeling weird. What kind of shit is that? I guess moviemakers call that "third-dimensional characters" but this movie really isn't that kind of party. But if you're making a movie set during WW2 and you want a Nazi who's also a pretty decent dude, then I guess Thomas Kretschmann is your Aryan Superman.

Part of the Valkyrie plan involves a Reserve Army general named Fromm. He's basically to his fellow Nazis what Al Pacino was to his fellow mobsters in Donnie Brasco. This guy gets no fucking respect. He's always getting yelled at by his superiors and they even make him look like a bitch in front his boss Adolf by telling him to go get some fresh tea. Fromm's an asshole, though, so fuck him. You can tell he fancies the idea of this Valkyrie deal when Stauffenberg and Shaun of the Dead's step dad tell him about it, but at the same time he's against it. If this works, Fromm will hold a way higher position than he holds now and get some goddamned respect for a change. But he's also a pussy about taking the risk, preferring to stay as the bitch he is and take shit everyday from fat mustached assholes in ill-fitting uniforms. To make it worse, he threatens to fucking tattle on them if they bring this shit up with him again. So like I said, fuck him.

So Stauffenberg and the Valkyrie Squad are in it to win it, but he's got some concern involving his family. He's all about killing Cocksucker Adolf, but he also knows that if this plan fails then he's found out, and if he's found out, his wife and kids are gonna take that long ride down with him. That's just like life, isn't it? Sometimes you want to do some crazy shit, but then you can't because of the wife and kids. So take this as a lesson, folks: If you want to live life and take risks, don't get married and don't have kids. But if you do decide to get married and have kids, shut your bitch ass up about the shit you can't do anymore because you shoulda fuckin' known. I made that decision never to get married or have kids a long time ago, but it's pretty easy to make that decision when you look like me and have my shitty attitude, but I can see how that would be difficult for decent looking dudes with a sense of humor and a job and some money in the bank and who have the ability to attract women. But at least I can live my exciting life of never getting out of the shack and watching shitty movies and drinking myself into stupors all alone and if it's not so cold that night, maybe jerk off to porn. So take THAT, bitches!

There's a scene in the movie where Stauffenberg actually meets Ol' One-Nut at his vacation home, and it's interesting to see a Hitler who isn't always yelling or foaming at the mouth. He's played very calm but intense, and I was surprised to see him calmly go over and pet his dog (a German Shepherd -- who woulda thunk it?) and just be generally cool with people. You totally get the sense though that one wrong word would probably make this asshole snap and start acting all rabid and pounding on tables, like the Hitler we all know and love.

I like that they cut to a shot of his lunch during that scene; a plate of sauerkraut and potatoes and something else that isn't made of meat. It brings up how Da Hitla was a vegetarian, which always makes me smile. Most vegetarians I know are cool people, but sometimes you meet the occasional militant who will give you shit because you like a nice juicy rare steak and they go off about the poor animals and how meat is bad for you anyway and that it even brings out violent instincts in people and at that point I just yell HITLER WAS A VEGETARIAN and they usually go quiet but still give me that fucking look. Sometimes they come back with how he's only one bad example and I counter with, yes he's only one example of a man who accomplished the murder of SIX MILLION LIVES. Then she tells me to go fuck myself and I tell her to go to hell and next thing you know we're passionately making out in front of everybody and dry-humping on the table. Then I wake up.

I don't know why, but I thought this was going to be a long movie. Maybe because it's based on a pretty serious topic and because it was released in December. But it's not, it's about two hours with trailers and it has a good pace. At heart it's really just a solid caper movie, not some Important Movie That Will Make You Think, like most films of the season. I'm a sucker for caper movies, basically any kind of movie that features a scene with a group of dudes gathered around some kind of table, looking at a map or blueprints or schematics of something and going over what each guy is going to do and how & when they're going to do it, I'm down with. I love that shit. It's probably a guy thing, too. I mean, that asshole Dane Cook had a pretty right-on thought for a change when he said that all guys want to be part of a heist.

I would expand on that and say all guys want to be part of a secret plan to do shit; whether it's a plan to commit a heist, kill a motherfucker, or escape from somewhere, I think most if not all dudes would love the idea of being involved in something like that with their bros. Not for real, of course, but in that part of a man's brain where stupid fantasies that only men have pop up, alongside fantasies of scoring a winning touchdown in the Super Bowl or fighting alongside your bros in some kind of epic battle, or performing a kickass guitar solo in front of a crowded stadium of adoring fans. That's why Madden NFL, Call of Duty and Guitar Hero sell like fuckin' hotcakes.

Anyway, this is a good flick. Bryan Singer directed it and Way of the Gun dude co-wrote it. I think this is the first time since The Usual Suspects that they worked on something together, at least officially, not counting potential rewrites and shit. No way is it as good as Suspects, but you can't hold that kind of shit against them, that's a pretty fucking hard flick to top. It's definitely better than Superman Returns, the first X-Men movie and Apt Pupil. Not to mention that fuckin' Public Access movie he did. Wow, that makes Singer 3 out of 7 with me. Maybe I should stop cutting homeboy any more slack.

They also serve Crumbs cupcakes over there

In the second week of December, I came across some extra money, and decided not to use it to pay off massive debt. I will die with that debt, so they can go fuck themselves. What was more important was to get out of my stuffy shack, so I drove over to the Silent Movie Theatre in piece-of-shit Los Angeles and bought a ticket for Nicky Katt's Smackum-Yackum Saturday. Nicky Katt is an actor who's been in some cool movies, so you probably caught one of them. You can find out here: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0441588/

This past year, Mr. Katt hosted two other all-night movie marathons at this place. The first one involved Good Ol' Boy Southern type stuff, and the second one was called Mug-Melter Monday and was just different movies that were all cool. I went to both of those and they were a good time. They had a barbecue grill available to anyone who brought hot dogs and they had lots of free beer; Shiner Bock and Asahi. They were not nearly as well attended as you figured they would be though, which may have had something to do with being scheduled on weeknights. But the city of L.A. missed out, because they was good times, especially Mug-Melter Monday. That one started at 7pm and ended around 5am. They had a D.J. and a fog machine that went haywire and we saw the first 20 minutes of a crazy-as-fuck supernatural kung-fu flick called Boxer's Omen through that fucking fog. I went by myself, as usual, and if I didn't get so drunk on free Shiner early on, watching everyone else have a good time with their friends would've crushed my goddamn soul. Which is why I love booze. I could always try talking to people, but my testicles are too huge, making it difficult for me to walk all the way across to speak with strangers. Plus I've seen the brave souls who do that, and when they leave, they are usually mocked by those fuckin' assholes. Fuck 'em.

I arrived at 6:30 with a flask bottle of Jack Daniels so I can kill the lonely bug as quickly as possible, but I find out it's not necessary because in addition to Shiner and Asahi, Mr. Katt and the fine folks at the Silent Movie Theatre have supplied free hard liquor! Vodka, JD, orange juice, and whatever the fuck else. Fucking Awesome!

But you know what ISN'T awesome? That there were only about 8 or 9 people when I got there. On a Saturday night. Maybe it's just too early in the evening and it'll get better, I thought. I sit down and watch an old stop-motion short about some lumberjack who makes a clarinet out of wood and plays jazz music with it. Pretty cute. After that, they start the first movie, which is called Something Wicked This Way Comes.

It's about a carnival that comes to a small town, sometime in the 1920's or 30's or 40's, I can't fucking remember. Like most carnivals, the people working for it are evil scary motherfuckers lead by an more evil scary motherfucker and evil scary motherfucking shit happens. This was a Disney flick, and I don't think you'll see Disney make movies like this again, because it's pretty freaky. This is probably the only Disney family movie with a shot of a boy's decapitated head in a basket. There's a lot of freaky shit in this movie; a merry-go-round that either makes you younger or older depending which way it goes, scary bearded guys with moving tattoos, silent red-headed boys and motherfucking tarantulas. There's also midgets. I'm sure lots of little kids went to see this shit and had nightmares for a while. It's pretty fucking sweet, though.

The movie ended somewhere a little after 8pm and by then there were around 25 people, which is better than 8, but still pretty small. There's a break and by 8:30, Nicky Katt and this dude Hadrian, who's like the main dude at the Silent Movie Theatre came out to talk about the next movie, called Enter Laughing. I noticed a faint whiff of the sweet, sweet Sonny Chiba in the air before the movie started. To each his own.

Enter Laughing is a movie from the 1960's starring Poppie from Seinfeld. Poppie was a pretty handsome dude back then, playing this kid from New York City who wants to be an actor. He's got the dream of being a famous movie star but doesn't know the first thing about acting. Plus, he's got his parents who want him to become a pharmacist. The title of the movie comes from a scene where he auditions for a play and the first thing he says is "enter laughing". Poppie doesn't know that he's reading the stage directions as dialogue. There's a couple of cute chicks in the movie, and there's another one who's pretty but way too fucking skinny, and it reminds you that chicks like that were the exception and not the rule back then, like they are now. This chick is played by Elaine May, and I know that name because Alec Baldwin compared Tina Fey to this broad, so I guess she's a big deal. Another big deal is that Meathead's father Carl Reiner directed this movie, and it's based on a play that was based on a book he wrote that was kinda based on his life, if you got all that. I dug it, man. It was pretty funny and the audience seemed to dig it as well. There was a part where the director of the play is counting up the donations from last night's performance and he says something like "15 dollars? There were 30 people in that audience..." and either Nicky or Hadrian said something like "I know the feeling" and the 30 or so of us in the audience laughed.

Around 10:30 the movie ended and Nicky & Hadrian returned and talked about the next movie they would play after the break, called Prime Cut, a movie from the 70's with motherfuckin' Lee Marvin and motherfuckin' Gene Hackman. Everyone was pumped and then it was time for another break. Most people went to the back patio to eat hot dogs, talk and drink. I milled around, going back and forth, trying to look like I had something going on, all the while attempting to work my way to higher state of drunkeness.

Prime Cut started around 11 and it was a pretty decent flick. No great shakes, but it's cool to see Marvin being his typically badass self. He's a dude who works for the mob in Chicago, and he's sent down along with a few other dudes to Kansas City to collect some long overdue money from Hackman, playing a guy who runs a meatpacking joint named Mary Ann. Yup, homeboy's name is Mary Ann and they never explain that shit either, so you don't know if it's just a nickname or if it's just the cover name for the company like Sara Lee or Aunt Jemima or if his father was just a fucking asshole who never listened to that Johnny Cash song about a boy named Sue. Mary Ann's a real scary dude too, since the last guy the boys from Chicago sent to collect was sent back to them as a pack of sausages. He also sells drugged-up chicks on the white slavery market. Mary Ann's an asshole.

Of course it's not going to be easy, and there's a couple of cool scenes of Marvin and Hackman standing off and giving each other a hard time. There's a cool chase scene that leads to Marvin and Sissy Spacek (the only time I've ever seen her play the hot chick role) running from a combine as it tries to chop their asses up. The film climaxes with a shootout on Mary Ann's property, which starts at a sunflower field, then a greenhouse and finally in a barn. It's a pretty simple movie with a fast pace and the occasional weird moment, like when one dude tries to stab another dude with a sausage. This was back when you fucking believed in guys like Lee Marvin, you believed they were fucking badasses along with dudes like Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson, the last of their generation. As far as I'm concerned, they were quite capable of doing the shit they did in movies. I don't believe any of the movie star tough guys of today, seeing them as no more than just actors playing tough. Bunch of slack-jawed faggots, to quote the great Jesse "The Body" Ventura in Predator.

There was another break, and I went to get some more free JD. Two college-age girls were serving themselves some booze, and one of them said to the other something like "ok, we're not going to end up as Girls Gone Wild tonight, ok?" and they both giggled. Based on their behavior during Prime Cut, they were more like Girls Gone Really Fucking Annoying. Sorry girls, but nobody likes a drunk chick unless there's sex involved.

By the time the next movie started around 12:45, I was just the right amount of drunk, which was perfect because it was none other than Dangerous Men that appeared on the screen. This movie is like the Second Coming of Plan 9 from Outer Space. Well, the guy who made it passed away a some time ago and the movie kinda disappeared after it's original release. But now it looks like the Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre are gonna bringing it back. They had two sold-out screenings the week before this marathon, and I understand they're going to screen it again in late January. Sounds like they're going to make it the new "So Bad, It's Good" flick to watch, alongside Tommy Wiseau's The Room. Twenty minutes into the movie, the Girls Gone Really Fucking Annoying got up and left, never to return. It was like the movie was too much for them to take. Or maybe they just thought it sucked. Or maybe they were just late for a date rape by some future NFL star.

By 2:10, Nicky & Hadrian returned and let the audience vote by applause which of the three choices given would be played next:

--Star Hops, a goofy T&A movie from the late 70's

--It's Always Fair Weather, a Gene Kelly musical

--Revenge, the Kevin Costner flick about bloody motherfuckin' Revenge.

It came down to a tie between Revenge and Fair Weather. We left it to Nicky to be the tie-breaker and he chose Fair Weather.

I voted for Revenge, but I'm glad Nicky picked It's Always Fair Weather, because it's pretty damn good. This was the follow-up to Gene Kelly & company's smash hit Singin' in the Rain, but this one didn't do nearly as well in the box office. Too bad, because it's got some great set-pieces, my favorite being a dance sequence with Kelly on rollerskates. I almost jumped out of my seat and screamed "FUCK YEAH" at the end of that one, and if I was sloppy drunk at that point, I would've, but luckily I was calming down with the booze by then. I wasn't alone in my enthusiasm; there was crazy applause at the end of most of these routines.

Some weird shit happened, though. I guess there was a mistake and we watched the movie with one of the reels in the wrong place. What this meant was that it got to a point in the movie where people were referring to shit we didn't see, leaving us scratching our head wondering if maybe this was like Reservoir Dogs, where you never see the robbery but only hear about it. But then, after the exciting climax, the missing reel was played and it was like some Memento/Tarantino shit, where we now get to see all the shit they were referring to that happened before the events we DID see. Once that reel ended, everything was back in order. The audience was still with the movie the whole way, though. It felt like that anyway. The applause seemed genuine.

Another break, then the next film at 4:05: Star Hops. STAR HOPS? What the fuck?! Hardly anyone applauded for that movie when we voted. Fuckin' Revenge was the runner-up -- we should be watching Kevin Costner banging Madeleine Stowe and slicing motherfuckers throats open (not at the same time, though) right now! Someone behind the scenes had a hard-on for this movie and got his or her fuckin' way, I'm guessing.

Whatever. Star Hops is about two chicks who decide to buy the drive-in burger joint they work at after their boss quits. To improve business, they spruce up the place, wear skimpier outfits and hire a French chick who graduated from the Le Cordon Bleu but isn't taken seriously by her peers because she's a woman, or something like that, to work the grill. There's also an evil oil magnate who wants that property, so he recruits his son to get a job there and fuck shit up from the inside. It's pretty goofy and harmless and it ends the way you'd think it ends, with the bad guys punished and the good girls living happily ever after. The only thing keeping me interested was the main chick, the late actress Jillian Kesner. She was very pretty and had a smokin' body, so Ms. Kesner -- along with the free coffee I was drinking -- kept me awake.

A couple of interesting things during this screening occurred. At one point, it looked like Hadrian and Nicky were having a bit of a heated discussion. Hopefully not. But it did look kind of serious. Then halfway through the movie, Nicky stood up with his lady companion and said out loud: "Hadrian? This movie sucks!" then they both left. I don't remember seeing him at the end of the evening. Maybe I was in the john for his closing remarks.

It was around 5:40 after Star Hops and our last break, then it was on to the final movie of the night: a documentary called Blue Water, White Death, about a team of oceanographers looking to capture footage of the Great White Shark for the first time ever. This was before Jaws and before Shark Week, so this flick was a pretty big deal back then. Hadrian told us that it also served as partial inspiration for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

It was pretty interesting, and I could totally see what Wes Anderson took from it for his movie. My favorite being the onboard folk singer, who I figured was just an Anderson original, but no, he took it from here. It would make a cool double bill with Life Aquatic. Cool shark footage too.

By 7:30, it was all over. Not even a "thanks for joining us". Just lights on, blank screen and silence. Get the fuck out. Only 8 or 9 of us remained, which was also the same number of people at the beginning of the evening. We slowly got up and made our way out of there. I noticed Marc Heuck from the Nuart Theatre and the tv show Beat the Geeks was there with his lady friend. I threw away my coffee cup and empty beer bottles and got ready to meet the day.

I would like to think they'll do more of these marathons, and it kills me that not nearly as many people showed up as I thought should. Come on, there was free beer and booze! And a place to barbecue hot dogs! That's some really cool shit for a movie theater to offer people and unless more show up to take advantage, I fear they'll just stop going out of their way like that in the future. Then when I tell people what the Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre used to do for its patrons, they'll just tell me I'm full of shit. And that's fucked up.

Anyway, goodbye 2008. You fucked my shit up something awful and made me consider drastic things to kill the pain. Fuck you, 2008. Don't let the door hit you on the ass, you motherfucking cocksucking low-life piece-of-shit scumbag asshole cocksucker motherfucker. Fuck you and die.

2009, I hereby warn you to come correct. Be good to me, baby.